Roseanne Pegler, Executive Lead of the Regional Cancer Program Central LHIN, and Jay Lawrence, PatientWay CEO, will team-up to deliver a session at the upcoming IT Healthcare Canada Conference in Toronto this October.

Streamlining Cancer Centre Patient Registration and Symptom Management with an Automated and Patient-Centred Model will highlight how The Stronach Regional Cancer Centre and PatientWay are leading a successful project to streamline repeat visit check-ins for patients thanks to kiosk technology.

In an effort to improve the overall patient experience, the Stronach Regional Cancer Centre in Newmarket, Ontario, became the first Cancer Centre in the province to introduce an integrated symptom and registration kiosk for patients receiving cancer treatment.

The PatientWay Kiosk enables the Cancer Centre’s patients to enter a record of their symptoms at the same time as they register for their scheduled appointment. While patient registration and check-in kiosks have been widely used in other facilities for a number of years, the Stronach Regional Cancer Centre is the first to offer integrated check-in and symptom assessment apps.

The two organizations also engaged Cancer Care Ontario and Elekta to create a unique three-way integration between the hospital’s ADT, CCO’s ISAAC system and MosaiQ. Now, instead of having to visit two or three points of service, patients have the choice of using any of the five kiosks at the centre. These kiosks update the ADT, send a queuing message MosaiQ, and collect the patient’s ESAS scores from one seamless encounter.

Recently Kemptville District Hospital (KDH) hosted executives and patient access managers from nine other Eastern Ontario hospitals, to share their experience and learnings from providing patients with a self-service option for pre-registration and check-ins.

KDH serves an area south of Ottawa that has seen dramatic population growth in recent years. The area is popular with both retirees and commuters from Ottawa and is one of the fastest growing communities in the region. Striving to meet a heavier demand for healthcare services, KDH has enlarged its facilities, including the ER and OR.

Three months ago KDH launched a project with the collaboration of one physician from their OR, to evaluate whether or not online pre-registration and a check-in kiosk could help better streamline patient flow, create administrative efficiencies and improve patient satisfaction (see our blog post from May about the KDH project). KDH is already forecasting a potential savings of more than $100,000 in the first year alone, and a roll-out to the other nine physicians in the OR is already underway.

In her presentation to the group, Melissa DeDekker (KDH’s Health Records Professional) highlighted several key benefits being realized by her small 30 bed hospital, including:

3. A forecasted savings of more than $100,000. The forecast is based on the current 10-15 minutes saved per booking, with a roll-out to other areas of the hospital (outpatient services, diagnostic imaging, etc) and with an 80% adoption rate from patients.

4. A growing adoption by patients. In the first month, 20% opted for the self-service option. That figure grew to 29% the next month.

Melissa DeDekker also shared her team’s approach to the project, notably the planning and work that was done before going live with a web registration form and plugging-in a kiosk. To ensure that the initiative would become a success, they established clear goals and divided the implementation project into manageable phases, that included:

- Forming a project team, with people from the hospital and PatientWay
- Assessing current processes, and mapping a process redesign (the following graphic prepared by KDH clearly illustrates their new, more efficient process)

- Engage doctor’s offices and volunteers
- Trial mock patients in test environment, follow-up with a survey to gather feedback
- Pilot one surgeon’s OR patients for one month (thank you to Dr. Steven Oliver, from KDH’s orthopaedics clinic)
- Ongoing evaluation and adjustments as needed
- Roll out to other OR’s in phases

The information and insight above was reported by KDH after only three months – which is quite impressive! We look forward to hearing more from Melissa DeDekker and the KDH team in the months to come.